Comments

Could someone remind Dave that it’s actually a “hardware definition language” (e.g VHDL, verilog) what he’s referring as “high definition language”. Definitly there was something mixed up in the grey matter.

The only question that is ‘stupid’ is the one that never gets asked. And if the lecturer doesn’t feel like answering or making an effort to actually convey the information (and not just reciting his 20 year old notes), he needs to be reeducated himself . Especially if he’s the type that only cares for his research. Teaching is part of the game, no lame excuses.

Yes, it is a real shame that many of the practical aspects of electronic components and test & measurement aren’t taught in the universities. I was lucky to have a couple of summer and part time jobs during school that taught me more about the practicalities of electronics than I ever learned in the coursework (TV repair shop, and more).

Thanks for the answer!!!. And again, sorry for my crappy English. Here in Argentina you don’t need to learn any new language unless you move like 5000 kilometers or so. Argentinian is correct, go Dave!!!.

And yes, I will take the course in FPGA. I have experience with 8/16 bit microcontrollers, but none with FPGA only a couple classes at the college 7 years ago, which doesn’t count at all.

ARM looks interesting for doing big and diverse projects (like using USB + ethernet/WiFi + graphic displays + etc; all at once using RTOS or embedded Linux).
On the other hand FPGA is – I think – for very specific data processing (real time video processing for example).

Also I agree that the “software people” can compete with “electronic people” in ARM stuff. But for them would be very difficult to take on FPGA, unless you have a huge talent to learn by yourself like Jery Ellsworth or something.

So yeah!!! less competitors with FPGA!!!. Awesome, thank you very much guys, it was very clarifying.

Taking an FPGA course is definitly a good idea, because without it you will not know what these babies can do. Having some experience with programmable logic in the back of the head will help you out if you have a project with a weird digital interface that is impossible to bitbang.

You will also get a strong grasp on fine grained parallelism and pipelining, that will also help you for massively parallelized software plattforms ( like GPUs ), which are definitly becoming increasingly important for high performance DSP Tasks.

Another great podcast gents, keep up the good work! I’ve gone through about 20 in the past 2 weeks while laying out boards in work.

I find it hard to believe that in such a boyant industry such as the technology sector (that keeps the economy going), that electronics and programming (embedded and object-orientated) is not part of the national curriculum in schools. Hopefully the likes of Maker groups, Auduino and Raspberry Pi will try to inspire a new generation to get involved.

Btw I won’t be holding my breath for the Third Ed of “The Art of Electronics” any time soon!